Review by Frank Plowright

Bunny vs. Monkey has become a series guaranteed instant bestseller status with every new release as kids throughout the land buy into Jamie Smart’s mixture of the surreal and ridiculous. That it’s an updating of the insanity of the 1940s and 1950s Warner Brothers cartoons passes by the primary audience who voraciously lap up each new volume.

The title says it all. The straightlaced Bunny is infuriated by the ADHD antics of Monkey who has zero attention span as one madcap idea follows another. Other forest creatures bounce off and comment on their antics, prominently Skunky the scientist. Despite looking the same as other collections, there’s the innovation here of connected stories. Each episode stands up well as a madcap snippet on its own, but hanging over them all is Bunny going missing, and Smart building on that for the first few stories.

Smart certainly knows his audience, filling the stories with jokes involving bodily substances guaranteed to have kids squealing in delight while parents pull distasteful faces. Distasteful faeces is what Monkey covers Bunny house with, Skunky sets a remote controlled farting bum across the woods, and Monkey sets out to become the stinkiest creature in the universe by rolling around in all kinds of muck and not washing.

Bunny is rapidly found, although he’s lost his memory and has to learn things again. Toward the end of the collection, though, Smart returns to the subject of bunny going missing, and his resolution is the one weak aspect of the entire collection. It’s technobabble, which is fine, but possibly of a nature a little too complex for most readers.

Otherwise it’s magnificent, energetic cartooning and creatively silly stories all the way. No-one will be disappointed.